Back in November 2021, we decided to remove the fiat payment rails and only accept Bitcoin. We understand that this might limit our customer base, but we care more about setting a good example and exploring how to use Bitcoin as money in our day to day lives (after all, we’ve personally been on the #GetOnZero wagon too).
If you don’t have any Bitcoin, check our apps like Strike or Cash App. Those aren’t affiliate links. They’re what we personally use and we think they provide great services.
We run our own instance of BTCPay Server as a payment processor. This allows you, the customer, to pay us directly without having to go through a third party. Any payments that you send to us go directly to private keys that we control. If you’re interested in running BTCPay Server but don’t know where to start, let us know and we’d be happy to help.
At the time of writing this (January 21, 2024), we have set 0.001 BTC as the minimum amount for making an on-chain payment. Any invoices with a total less than this will only allow Lightning payments (Lightning payments are allowed for all payments regardless of amount). We’re doing this because on-chain fees have been relatively high and will likely to continue to increase over time (that’s a great thing for Bitcoin). By setting this minimum, we’re avoiding a few issues:
- Setting the transaction fee high enough to get into the next block or two will result in the transaction fee being about as high as the actual payment (not great for the customer).
- Having a bunch of small UTXOs means we’re going to have to spend a lot of Bitcoin trying to consolidate them; if fees go too high, some of those UTXOs may even turn to “dust.”
- If a customer sends a transaction with too low of a fee, it might take some some for us to catch that. The order will be in a state of limbo until we manually push it along. And we’ll only do that by securing that payment with a child pays for parent (CPFP) transaction to protect ourselves.
The benefit of this minimum is that the Lightning payment is immediate and extremely cheap. It makes the customer happy and it makes us happy. Of course some infrastructure needs to be built out to make this as smooth as possible, so help us out by creating a Lightning channel with us.
Our minimum threshold is subject to change without notice. We’ll see where the fee market takes us!
If you don’t have a Lightning wallet, the aforementioned Strike and Cash App have the ability to pay with Lightning built in. Otherwise, check out wallets like Phoenix or Breez or Mutiny.
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us via the menu above.